Dare Wright wrote creepy children’s books about talking teddy bears
and a pouty doll who gets spanked for bad behavior. Although the
photographs are lasting in a unsettling (if inappropriate) way, I
am not suggesting run out and buy these books for your
three-year-old. Or five-year-old. They’ll think the stories
are weird and you even weirder for chasing a remote childhood
memory. The first of the lot was published in 1957. They show their
age. They do, however, leave an impression.

In A Gift From The Lonely Doll, Edith, a.k.a. the Lonely Doll (whose
blank look bears an eerie resemblance to Wright), knits Mr. Bear a
muffler. She knits and she knits and as she knits she pours her
heart and soul and all of her longing into her scarf; slowly, the
muffler grows. Row after row she knits, head down in her own
private rhythm, switching colors for stripes. A pattern
emerges. Sometimes she drops her work and it unravels so she picks
it up again and knits some more and stuffs it into her basket and
refuses to show it to needling Little Bear. Alone, she knits in the
dark when Mr. Bear’s not looking. She knits out of love and when
she’s naughty she knits for forgiveness. The muffler continues to
grow. When it’s time to deliver her gift she realizes, aided
by Little Bear’s taunting, how carried away she’d gotten. Her
muffler is absurdly long. It consumes the whole room! Terrible!
Full of holes! Impractical! Heartbroken, Edith, adorned in an
extravagant fur hood, plummets into despair. She sulks and cries
until it dawns on her that maybe she loved her little prezzie too
much, fueled as it was by a self-serving desire for Mr.
Bear’s approval, so much so that it clouded her judgment; despite
all this, the power to fix her work lies within. Carefully, she
mends the holes and ties loose ends and trims her muffler down to
modest size. One becomes three. Mr. Bear, Little Bear, and Albert
(also a Bear) revel in Edith’s handmade bounty, which keeps them
warm through winter. The lonely doll is elated, the world a little
less lonely. The end.

So.

On a good day, writing follows a similar process. During the
generative stage, we bow our heads and knit ideas and write with
the sum of ourselves without much thought to practical application
or audience. We write in private, in stolen moments, we write from
love and shame and a desire to connect and a sense of urgency; as
words stitch together we squirrel away pages without looking back
or editing or examining the gaps and shortcomings until the whole
thing is done and what we have created is a sprawling imperfect
lumpy first draft. An unruly mess.

Then we weep into our soup. We fall apart at family functions. We
indulge in dark stretches of self-pity while wearing ridiculous
fluffy head ornaments.

After a while, however, we claw out of the abyss. With a cold eye and
a little perspective, we go back and examine the flaws in our work
and strive for clarity as we edit and revise and edit and revise
and hopefully improve upon our initial efforts. We cut out the
sentences that prance and preen and otherwise love themselves too
much. We pare it all down. In the end we hope that what rises from
the chaos is not a vain attempt to impress but something humble
and functional and real, a story that wraps around lives and
touches not one – but many.

Comments

It’s interesting that you denigrate Dare Wright’s classic
children’s books by calling them “creepy” and “weird” and the
photographs “unsettling.” Where in “A Gift From The Lonely Doll” do
you think those terms apply, and why would you use that story as a
metaphor for writing if it was so inappropriate?

Thanks for your comment, Edith. i do find the sexualization of
dolls unsettling, I find the endorsement of corporal punishment creepy,
and I find the narratives themselves dated. My children, who have
trouble relating to them, have deemed them “weird.” However, they are
stories that have stayed with me from my own childhood. (Plus, as an
adult, I am eerily drawn to the comparisons (physical and otherwise)
between Edith and what was known of the author, Dare Wright.) However, I
chose to write about this particular story because the muffler is a
useful analogy as it relates to the process of writing.